‘Shit happens’: Margrethe Vestager responds to French fuss over her US hire

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s antitrust chief was trying to do the right thing in picking a renowned U.S. professor as a top EU competition economist.

“I just wanted to find the right person and do it in the right fashion and then, shit happens,” Margrethe Vestager told a POLITICO reporter on Friday at the Unamido Japanese ramen restaurant near Flagey square in Brussels.

The Danish commissioner, who has faced off against at least one shouting Big Tech executive and U.S. presidential venom, endured a potentially damaging setback last week over her choice of Fiona Scott Morton, who has been described as one of the “best economists in the world” in her field, for the influential EU chief competition advisory role.

The shit, or rather la merde, came pretty much from one direction — when French President Emmanuel Macron joined other French politicians in criticizing the European Commission for choosing an American for the senior EU post. Macron said neither the U.S. nor China would allow something similar, and that it would be “extremely worrying” if no qualified EU economist could do the job.

Scott Morton then withdrew as potential chief economist, citing “the political controversy that has arisen because of the selection of a non-European” for the job.

The Commission must now go back to the drawing board for the economist job it wanted to have filled by September — just as it is slated to be making decisions on which Big Tech gatekeeper companies will face a regulatory straitjacket.

The job it initially advertised in March — without the usual criteria of having to be an EU citizen — only attracted 11 candidates, among whom Scott Morton was the most qualified, the Commission said.

“We obviously made a political mistake,” said a Commission official who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “We could have foreseen that the French, who have a kind of love-hate relationship with the United States, would react like this.”

“We thought that we were the best competition authority in the world, that we had nothing to prove, and that we could open up the game to get the very best,” the official told POLITICO.

It’s a rare misstep for Vestager, who in the past has deftly managed French ire at what some in Paris see as EU opposition to big deals that could create “European champions,” along with French complaints last year that it needed more flexibility to grant state support to companies in trouble.

Elisa Braun contributed reporting.